


Lights Inside Their Eyes

by Nachte



Series: Blackbird [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, Child Death, Gen, Gore, enslavement, troll observations on human culture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-24
Updated: 2012-03-24
Packaged: 2017-11-02 11:07:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/368297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nachte/pseuds/Nachte
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You've slid, finally, to the frayed and rotting end of your already short rope. It was only a matter of time, you assure yourself. </p><p>Your luck up to this point has been capricious but, at least, loyal.</p><p>But it has finally run out. </p><p>If you were one to pray, you would pray that at least it's not the culling ditch you end up in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lights Inside Their Eyes

They march you through the decaying streets like cudbeasts to the slaughter. In fact the only reason you know you aren't going to be slaughtered is because nobody wastes time when it comes to killing a troll. You are culled and rolled into the nearest culling ditch so that your corpse might be requisitioned and used for who the fuck knows. Your current theories settle somewhere between being ground up and fed to grubs in a hilarious circular irony, or boiled down into the disgusting bio fuel that powers most of the derelict machinery on this hateful spawning rock. 

You think a lot about what happens when you die. Your religious theories eventually shriveled up when you became accustomed to the blank stares of corpses you passed. To be honest you never expected to live this long, in fact you had no idea what you would do if you lived this long. 

The heavy chains around your bare ankles rattle as you shuffle in line with the dozens of other captured low bloods. A hitch in the line causes you all to jostle and you do your absolute best not to stumble. A poor shitblood three sorry suckers down does, and he's hauled to his feet by the electric crackle of a cudbeast prod. His shrieks aren't as haunting as you suspect they should be. 

Maybe that’s just a part of being your species, you think about that a lot as well. Is it just the nature of being a troll that the pain of others doesn't stir copacetic feelings, or is it something else; nature versus nurture? 

Ha, or lack thereof. There is nothing nurturing about your society.

The howls at the front of the line, which seems endless to you when you lean to the side to observe its length, are a tad concerning though. 

Maybe they are culling you after all. 

That insufferable kernel of hope you just can't seem to kill in yourself demands that you believe that they aren't. You want to live. You aren't particular sure why; it is like cutting off your own nose, you suppose, to spite your face. It would be so much easier to die like the other anomalies, subject yourself to the culling blocking, willing as those like you had before. 

Fuck them. You didn't crawl out of the spawning caverns lusus-less to die willingly. 

The line lurches awkwardly and you let your mind drift to pass the time until you are also howling from whatever your fate is going to be at the front of the line.

  


The decidedly unpleasant events that resulted in your current insufferable predicament are still at the forefront of your mind. If you had just kept your head low, they wouldn't have sniffed you out. Really it doesn't even matter that they sniffed you out, it would have been fine if –

  


Even the slavers wouldn't have really mattered.

  


But –

  


You want to call shenanigans and multiple counts of bullshit, but you have nobody to call it to. Still you are convinced that whatever non-existent blood ancestor you have must have been off climbing a wall of dripping bulges, because really that entire series of events had been an exceptional chain of self-depreciating fellatio.

He or she, you concede, must have looked back in the nick of time though, because you aren't in a culling ditch dripping your shame all over the unfortunate corpses below you. 

You had only wanted –

  


To learn.

The line has advanced considerably and you take this time to observe the dilapidated market that surrounds you. Trolls of varying ages peddle their wares around you to other trolls who are not so unfortunately fucked as to be in chains. The smell of fried slitherbeasts, dripping with fat and covered in thick golden batter does a number on your stomach as you eye them somberly from the line. They rest in a neat little row cooling at the front of a stand with a brilliant green canopy.

You have formed your own theories about what a lot of smells must taste like, but you knew exactly how fried siltherbeast could melt in your mouth, the buttery batter flaking delicately and sticking to your lips to be licked up. 

When you were younger and your eyes had been the same liquid silver as everyone else's, you had eaten whatever you could steal, or whatever a few copper siliskas could buy. This humble street peddler food was one such thing. You haven't been back in the city in so long though you'd nearly forgotten the appeal of market food.

The line continues to lurch and sooner than later you are far enough away from the stall that you can no longer smell the hot oil and roasted flesh. 

Another shop catches your eye, the glass window front is still intact and the faded words for 'bookstore' have been painted over sloppily to read 'Yarkit's Curiosities.' The mortar holding the building together looks like it maybe has a few more sweeps left in it, and crawling vines have already started to cannibalize the top stories. You spare a glance for comparison, and really a lot of the street is in a similar state of ramshackle disrepair. 

There sitting in the front of the window of the shop though, are several human magazines and other off world oddities. Your interest for human culture is practically nonexistent, it doesn't help that you can't read their weird alphabet. No, it's the long silver gleam of the blade resting above the picturesque magazine covers that draws your attention. It's alien and extrinsic and does in fact live up to the concept of a proper curiosity. 

Its handle is incredibly long and wrapped tightly in some kind of cloth, dark blue, that overlaps delicately to form openings in the shape of sharp geometric diamonds, each space revealing the carved bone of the handle beneath. You sniff at that, humans' taste in design is so cold. Everything is sharp edges, straight lines, and harsh angular shapes; it strikes you as lifeless and even a little unsettling. 

Yet the weapon continues to hold your attention as you shuffle short person-lengths of space up the street at a sluggish pace. Its blade is much longer than any sword you've seen a troll carry, and you wonder the purpose of so many extra inches of distance. Briefly you ponder how humans must fight, you have only seen the strange pale-skinned aliens from a distance in your arguably longer-than-expected lifetime. Surely it can't be that different from how your own species fights, your anatomical make-up seems to be close enough to facilitate similar tactics.

As you come parallel with the storefront, it's easier to see the details in the blade. Such as the curious little guard between the handle and the blade. You've seen highblood sabers with the same guard, but those are not all encompassing like this one is. 

The chain jerks and you stumble the few obligated steps forward with your ankles infuriatingly hobbled together, and with the new angle you catch the intricate engraving along the blade, and for some reason the sight of it sticks with you. 

A fierce looking scalebeast with a long slitherbeast-like body and long, strange-looking whiskers. Its face is stylized and its mouth stuffed full of fangs. 

You can't fathom such a creature, thinking about how it must move with its front and back legs so close together makes your thinkpan ache. Still, the engraving stays with you and unbeknownst to your present self; the image will still come to your mind sweeps from now. 

Eventually your journey down this foreboding line leads you away from the colorful main street and down through a lifeless alley. Trolls ahead of you talk to each other, and trolls behind you communicate as well; they make no effort to talk to you. 

They make considerable effort to stay as far from you as they can, but this is something you hardly notice anymore. Instead you examine the way the neon from the rooftops illuminate the damp brick and cobblestone and how it bathes everything in sickly greens and flushed pinks. 

Someone has graffitied elaborate street-style letters along the narrow walls. The paint, in this damp setting, looks as if you could reach out and smear it. The rebel in you, so very angry, wishes you could. 

Among the dozens of pointless tags and stylish rendition of troll signs an oddity catches your gaze. 

Human letters, bold and stylized like everything else is. 

H-A-T-E

  


You can't fathom what it means and you've run out of time to ponder it because the alley opens up into the main square of the markets and your attention is immediately drawn to the source of the howls you had been tuning out effectively until just now.

It seems you have reached the front of the line.

Not to say you are at the very front, but you are a mere handful of trolls from your fate and you are privileged to the sights and smells of the market center as you breech the alley way and step into the open. 

The square is both equally gruesome and repugnant, an affront to all of your senses. 

The smell hits your unassuming redolence receivers first and you can't wrinkle your poor nose fast enough and your eyes start to water almost immediately. Its so strong your stomach twists and threatens to claw it's way up from your innards and out of your mouth. 

The tang is sweet and sticky, you recognize it almost immediately. It's the unmistakable wafting scent of a culling ditch, but you can't see it and then with horror you realize you're standing on top of it. Bands of cobblestone are spaced by rings of iron grating, making for a giant morbid bulls-eye. 

You stare down between your bare feet and almost forget to move when the chain shuffles, but even the troll length of space you travel isn't enough to get you off the grating and in the stone ditch below it drifts along a small river of putrified corpses. 

The juices that the carcasses float along in what seem to be a sticky vomit of blood and rotting sewage, coalescing into an unsatisfying shit color that smells even worse than it looks. The heat that bubbles up from it adheres to the bottoms of your feet in a thin film of grease and you are fast to scrape your soles against the stone when you escape the ditch.

You feel like your neck might snap as you look up to take in the gruesome visage of the gallows, high up so as to be visible by anyone─ regardless of whether or not they way to see it. Its stone is weathered and its wood practically petrified as it sits in the center of square. A crippling edifice of stalwart Alternian justice. How you would love to see it burn.

You imagine it's been here longer than the city. In fact you suspect the city sprung up around it; out of the technicolor blood of those whose necks have snapped at the end of its ancient ropes. The awe of it runs your own blood cold as a salt drinker's. 

The line shuffles and you are dragged painfully back to your own reality when the ugly ancient iron hobbles bite into your bare ankles and force you forward again. 

The sting of heavy black acrid smoke and the sweet smell of burning flesh are strong enough sensations that they begin to overpower the smell of rot and when you are but the fifth in line for your fate you finally discover what your fate is. 

It's not culling, at least. 

The machine is archaic, an ugly soot-stained anachronism like half the shit in this festering cadaver of a capital. 

Its tall and foreboding and at first you are not sure what its purpose is until you watch them cut a wriggler from the line. Maybe no older than five sweeps, too fucking young. Brat's eyes were still a defenseless mercury and they meet yours for only a split second before they're hauling him shaking like a leaf up to the hulking metal villainy. 

He squeals like a stuck oinkbeast when they yank his arm straight and shove it into the gnarled metal brace the contraption seems to center around. Thick leather straps hold the snot's forearm soft side up and your attention is draw away to a blue blood who stands on the opposite of the machine. 

She checks a list on a holo-grub and turns what you assume are ancient rust coated dials you can't see. This action lurches the entire machine and a large multi-sectional cylinder rotates it's various disc-like sections, and when they stop you can make out that each one is covered in the standard numerals zero to nine. 

It's a serial brander. 

It's the serial brander. 

As if to mark your brilliantly glacial deduction of its purpose, the machine hisses to life and you watch the cylinder number press super heat to glowing white levels of way the fuck too hot. You understand vaguely that the engine that’s pumping black pustules of greasy smoke into the night actually heats coils inside the number press which then in turn heats the heavy iron numbers on the outside. 

The little silver nipper screams and fights; he's all tiny pupa fangs and ugly yellow tears, and he fights to free his arm with all the might his small form can muster. 

It stirs an uncomfortable urge in your body, irrationally you want to break from the line and go to him. Feasibly you know this is impossible; you're chained to those in front and behind you, but it doesn't stop your unexplainable desire to rush to the wriggler's side and tame his fears. 

You are fairly certain this is not a common troll urge, and the faces of those around you reflect amusement, annoyance, or a mixture of both when you check. 

A grinning indigo reaches up with thick arms that inform you he likely lacks thought capacity beyond that of the basest understandings and grips the heavy crank used to pull down the press. There is no ceremony as he turns it. 

The scream curdles your blood and the little wriggler slides down and hangs from his trapped arm, you refuse to look at anything but the ground when they pull the press back up, but it doesn't stop the smell of cooked flesh from invading your snout. 

It's over, you think, as if you could carry your thoughts to the little one. It's over you made it, you'll be okay.

“Tch-- can't even read it. Stupid little shit moved around too much in the sling.” 

“Then he's useless.” 

Its effortless the way the huge indigo holds the little silver nipper and flips the curved culling knife out of his boot. 

Smooth the blade bites and you jerk your eyes away back to your bare feet. Suddenly curling your toes is mind-blowingly fascinating; the kid doesn't even scream, he doesn't get the chance to. They dump the child suffocating and clawing at his own throat into the grate-covered culling ditch.  
You can't stop focusing on the gurgling wet gasps and sounds of sloshing filth until they cease. You hear no other sounds until they cut your chains and it haunts your core like nothing before it has. 

A quiet voice in deep in the recesses of your mind asks why you had to be born with this disability. This inability to ignore the suffering and the damned. 

Of which make up the gross majority of your civilization, including yourself.

You stare at the boy's dead mercury eyes and his garish second mouth that seeps endless globules of still-warm mustard blood as they strap your arm into the brander. 

They pull the press down and the heat dries out your face as it descends. You turn your eyes to the indigo who turns the crank and you stare. The pleasure it brings you to watch how increasingly unnerved he becomes is delightfully troll in it's nature and grounds you back again in reality. 

Reassures you that you're of your species. 

The burn of the cylinder is unfathomable, it seeps into your bones and through your teeth and sears at the molecular fiber of your very being. You grit your dull teeth and stare down the imbecile at the crank, and you neither shake nor scream. 

The blue blood has to pull you out of the sling because the indigo fucker refuses to touch you. It is the most satisfying victory you have felt in a long time. 

You look at your arm as they haul and shove you towards the holding pins like the cudbeast you now truly are. Livestock. You are surprised it took this long.

The bright angry crimson of your underflesh reads: 

626262

and now that is all you are.


End file.
